Misconceived Green Movements

Unlike shellfish, which through filtering manage to make the surrounding water cleaner, salmon are waste-makers with few equals. A sizable salmon farm can generate as much liquid waste as a small city. Since these pens are typically stacked with thousands of salmon, diseases can spread quickly and require full-scale slaughter (which is what happened at a Scotland fish farm in 1999 and one in Maine in 2000).

Salmon also have huge appetites, so fish farmers feed them by grounding up smaller species, but the trade-off is a rip-off: As many as five pounds of ground fish yield only a single pound of salmon. If the goal is to feed a hungry planet, this exchange is not only terribly wasteful, it’s also nonsense.

If that weren’t enough to label this a misconceived green movement, consider this: Wild salmon eat krill; farmed salmon don’t. The consequence is that the flesh of farmed salmon isn’t pink, it’s gray. Farmers color it pink with a pigment.

Killer carp

Speaking of fish farms: In the 1970s, commercial fish farms in the Midwestern U.S. had an algae problem. The solution seemed simple enough: Introduce into the water a known algae-consuming machine, the Asian carp. It worked, and today the algae problem is a thing of the past. The new, much more serious problem, however, is the Asian carp.

This fish has some peculiar abilities: It leaps 10 feet out of the water, which has allowed it to leave fish farms behind and reach the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers, where it has unveiled another ability — ecological domination.

Adult Asian carp are huge, pushing 40 pounds (imagine 40 pounds of anything leaping through the air). They have insatiable appetites and eat every biological thing they can find — unless it’s baited on a hook. As a result, they have reached the apex of the river’s food pyramid, meaning they have no predators. Their numbers are growing at an alarming rate, while commercial fishermen are quitting by the hundreds, putting a tremendous strain on the local economies.

Experts worry the Asian carp will reach the Great Lakes and waste little time making it their own before moving on to the numerous tributaries, driving out the salmon and trout that currently support a multibillion dollar industry.

Save the Seals campaign

Greenpeace USA is a pioneer in the use of what they call “media mind bombs,” defined as “consciousness-changing sounds and images to blast around the world in the guise of news.” Few tactics have proven more effective in garnering public sympathy than images and videos of the wholesale slaughter of seals by fur traders, which was part of a wider campaign launched by Greenpeace and other animal rights groups to bring an end to this practice.

The campaign’s first major achievement came in 1982, when the European Commission banned seal skin imports — a ban Greenpeace still considers a victory. Further lobbying resulted in the European Economic Community passing legislation in 1991 to ban imports of specific furs obtained using leghold traps.

What isn’t mentioned is the devastating effect this misconceived green movement has had on indigenous Arctic communities that have been hunting seals for hundreds — if not thousands — of years. These are communities for whom trapping seals is important not just for economic purposes, but also for maintaining long-held traditions. Additionally, one of the difficulties overlooked by this misconceived green movement’s urgent in-your-face imagery is that for these communities there is no other alternative for earning income, especially in the winter months.

Just as importantly, although there was a well-documented history of attempts to develop humane traps in the 1940s and 1950s, the efforts of groups like Greenpeace turned the seal hunt into a fundraising tool, reaping millions of dollars in contributions without ever offering an actual solution to the problem. In other words, while Greenpeace prospered economically, these Arctic communities faltered.

it’s not easy being green

Flawed movements of the past don’t necessarily discount the merits of the present, but they should serve as reminders that “experts” aren’t perfect. If doctors earn undeserved credibility by wearing white coats, environmentalists can earn it with statistical projections and doomsday language.

One of the most common analytical mistakes people make is the most disabling: responding to complex questions with simplistic solutions. This is especially true when discussing environmental problems, since an ecosystem is inherently interdependent upon the system of life cycles within it, which further support wider ecosystems that are threaded through local human populations, thus weighing upon economies and directly affecting the quality of human life.